“The Palmy Days of Trade”: Anglo-American Culture in Savannah, 1735-1835 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History of the College of Arts and Sciences 2013 By Feay Shellman Coleman M.A., University of Georgia, 1977 B.A., Connecticut College, 1971 Committee Chair: Professor David Stradling ABSTRACT This dissertation is a transnational study that traces the religious, economic, and cultural factors that kept the bonds between Savannah, Georgia and Great Britain strong and vital long after the United States achieved political independence. Through an analysis of Savannah’s pre-eminent merchant family, the Boltons, and their associates, this study demonstrates that enduring connections to Great Britain influenced both the built environment and cultural spaces that Savannahians occupied for about a century-- from Georgia’s founding in 1735 until 1835. Evidence drawn from material culture as well as a fresh reading of traditional sources support this thesis. In addition to documents, primary sources that anchor the analysis include buildings and neighborhoods where Savannahians worshiped, lived, and worked in England and America. Because material culture embodies the social meanings of the economic, religious, and domestic purposes it serves, analysis of specific buildings and neighborhoods in Savannah as counterparts to English prototypes proves the case for common culture. Throughout the dissertation, both material culture and a traditional array of documentary sources reinforce the arguments. Since this study embraces material culture and urban spatial relationships as potent sources, resulting insights break boundaries that have limited scholarship in the past. Scholars have long scrutinized Southern rural elites. And, more recently, historians have concentrated on people at the bottom of the social scale. This research is a long overdue examination of Savannah’s prosperous, urban middle class. Historians of the New Republic often think in terms of what set the United States apart from Great Britain in the period of nation building before 1835. This dissertation ii adds the dimension of continuity to the scholarly conversation. By presenting new insight into the blending of cultures, this study shows how economic, religious, and cultural interdependence sustained transnational relationships and diluted the meaning of politically drawn borders. At the same time it sheds new light on the themes of religion, gender, class, race, enterprise, and urban life in Savannah. iii Copyright © 2013 by Feay Shellman Coleman iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As I begin to draft the final paragraphs of my dissertation, it gives me great pleasure to look up from the computer monitor to recognize institutions and individuals who have sustained me through years of study, research, and writing. The University of Cincinnati provided crucial funding for my graduate work via Graduate Scholarships, Graduate Teaching Assistantships, and teaching appointments. The much appreciated assistance of a Charles Phelps Taft Dissertation Fellowship, a Daughters of American Revolution Fellowship, a Groesbeck Scholarship of The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in Ohio, a Miller Fellowship, and a Distinguished Dissertation Completion Fellowship enabled me to concentrate on research and writing. A Forbes, Inc. Scholarship to the Victorian Society in America’s London Summer School; a Cincinnati Branch of the English Speaking Union Travel-Study Grant; and a Charles Phelps Taft Graduate Enrichment Grant provided the means for me to carry out research in England. Sympathetic archivists and librarians are frequently a historian’s best ally. My work has benefitted from the expertise and dedication of staff members at institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. I am indebted to the employees of the Guildhall, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Royal Institute of British Architects; National Archives, Kew; the British Library; and the Liverpool Public Library. In the United States the personnel of the Chatham County Court House, Georgia Historical Society, the Southern Historical Collections of the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Special Collections of Duke University, and the American Philosophical Society have cheerfully fulfilled my requests for documents. Mikaila Corday of the v Interlibrary Loan Department at the Langsam Library of the University of Cincinnati deserves a special mention. I am grateful to her for expeditiously locating and procuring many obscure books, articles, and documents. The community within the History Department of the University of Cincinnati has made the third floor of McMicken Hall like a second home to me. I am grateful for the camaraderie and intellectual stimulation of my fellow graduate students and faculty members, especially Aaron Cowan, Rob Gioielli, David Merkowitz, Charlie Lester, Rory Krupp, and Jacob Melish. The scholarship and penetrating insights of longstanding committee members, Geoff Plank, Maura O’Connor, and Patrick Snadon have been an inspiration and aspiration for my own work. I also owe my gratitude to Wayne Durrill for serving on the committee. Hope Earls, History Department Administrative Coordinator, keeps the mechanisms of academic bureaucracy well-oiled and running smoothly. From day one, she has been the “go to” problem solver for me. Whether or not it would be juicy reading will remain to be seen because I most certainly will not embarrass him or myself by detailing all the myriad ways in which my committee chair, David Stradling, has shown me patience over the years I have been his student. Suffice it to say that he is the kind of person to whom grace and generosity come so easily that he has long forgotten most of the large and small considerations he has shown me. His wise counsel has been instrumental to any contribution to the field this project makes. I solely am responsible for any shortcomings. I am very thankful for my treasured friends and family who have remained supportive while they put up with neglect and accepted “dissertation” excuses for too long. At crucial moments, Evelyn Finnegan, Cynthia Hunter, Sonja Rethy, and Terry vi Meredith nudged me along with incentives that ranged from editorial expertise to outright bribes. My late husband Joseph’s backing and confidence in me stimulated my return to graduate school 25 years after I earned a masters degree. His untimely death left me struggling to maintain faith in myself without his daily encouragement. Since her father’s passing, our precious daughter Weslie has shown the constancy of the North Star in helping me find the way forward. She has made all the difference. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements v List of Figures ix Introduction 1 Prologue: John Wesley, Savannah, and Communitas 15 Chapter 1: Communitas Takes Root in Savannah, c. 1740-1775 25 Chapter 2: Slavery and an Elite Construction of Class and Race, c. 1785-1825 61 Chapter 3: From Middling Sorts to Capitalist Entrepreneurs: 75 Slavery and the Rise of R. and J. Bolton, c. 1785-1825 Chapter 4: Evangelism, Business Innovation and Changing Views 101 on Slavery in the Communitas, c. 1810-1825 Chapter 5: Communitas and Establishing a Career 127 in Architecture, c. 1810-1825 Chapter 6: The Domestic Style of Communitas: 155 Furnishing a Savannah Parlor, c. 1820 Chapter 7: Education and the Enduring Culture of Communitas 188 in Savannah, c. 1820-1840 Conclusion 231 Bibliography 236 Unpublished Primary Sources: Manuscripts Published Primary Sources: Books Visual Primary Sources: Maps Secondary Sources Figures 260 viii LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1 Feay Shellman Coleman, Schematic Furnishing Plan for The Richardson Parlor ix INTRODUCTION Savannah’s moss draped oaks and camellia blossoms never held the allure of exoticism for me. For curious tourists those objects evoke the romance, mystery, and mythology of the South. But for me as child growing up in Savannah, they were the raw materials of everyday life in imaginative play. I shaped Spanish moss into cozy beds where teddy bears napped. Buds and petals collected from under Granddaddy’s prized camellias morphed into the delicacies served at doll tea parties. As I matured the fantasies of child’s play receded, but my fascination with everyday life endured and predisposed me to a career that called for interpreting material culture. In due course I settled in my hometown of Savannah to curate the collections of the Telfair Museum of Art which included the early nineteenth-century Richardson house and its contents. My absorption with unanswered questions about the house, its original owners, and the workings of their everyday lives sent me to the archives. I wanted to understand the Richardson house in the specific context of Savannah in 1820. Eventually my investigations took me across the Atlantic to England and back in time to the English settlement of Georgia in the 1730s. What I have unearthed is the imprint of a century-long, transnational culture of reciprocal relationships among people living in Savannah and in the English middle class enclaves of the City of London and Liverpool. Today the Richardson house is the sole manifestation of a culture that contributed significantly to life in Savannah from the 1730s until it faded around 1830. I employ the term communitas to refer collectively to the loosely affiliated individuals who participated in this culture and experienced shared identities.1 The connections linking people within the communitas arose primarily from common interests rather than formal or hierarchical structures, so they left very little in the way of institutional records. Another contributing factor to the skimpy and scattered written records of the communitas is that it flourished when permeable boundaries—in religious, racial, social, and national identification— as well as mobility--both physical and social—were the order of the day.2 Family, religious, and economic alliances were the bonds of communitas that endured despite the geographic and political separation of Savannah and Great Britain.